Embers of War (2 page)

“We are more and more becoming colonialists in the minds of the people,” Kennedy writes in a trip diary. “Because everyone believes that we control the U.N. [and] because our wealth is supposedly inexhaustible, we will be damned if we don’t do what they [the emerging nations] want.” The United States should avoid the path trod by the declining British and French empires and instead show that the enemy is not merely Communism but “poverty and want,” “sickness and disease,” and “injustice and inequality,” all of which are the daily lot of millions of Asians and Arabs.

Upon returning to Boston in late November, Kennedy continues the theme in a radio address and in a speech before the Boston Chamber of Commerce. “In Indochina we have allied ourselves to the desperate effort of the French regime to hang on to the remnants of an empire,” he declares. “There is no broad general support of the native Vietnam Government among the people of that area,” for it “is a puppet government.” Every neutral observer believes “a free election … would go in favor of Ho and his Communists.”
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Bobby Kennedy’s perspective is much the same. The French, he writes to his father, are “greatly hated,” and America’s aid has made her unpopular by association. “Our mistake has been not to insist on definite political reforms by the French toward the natives as prerequisites to any aid. As it stands now we are becoming more & more involved in the war to a point where we can’t back out.” He concludes: “It doesn’t seem to be a picture with a very bright future.”
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Indeed. After the Kennedys’ departure, despite ever-rising levels of U.S. assistance, France’s fortunes continued to spiral downward, until by mid-1954 she had lost the war, following a spectacular defeat in the Battle of Dien Bien Phu, one of the great military engagements of modern times. The Eisenhower administration, by then far more committed to the war effort than were the French themselves, actively considered intervening with military force—perhaps with tactical nuclear weapons, in a heatedly debated secret plan ominously code-named Operation Vulture—to try to save the French position, and came closer to doing so than is generally believed. Neither President Dwight D. Eisenhower nor the U.S. Congress wanted to proceed without allied and especially British involvement, however, and the Winston Churchill government in London resisted strong administration pressure to go along. A peace agreement signed in Geneva divided Vietnam at the seventeenth parallel pending nationwide elections in 1956. Ho’s Communist nationalist government took control north of the parallel, its capital in Hanoi, while the southern portion came under the rule of the Catholic nationalist Ngo Dinh Diem. Diem gradually solidified his authority in South Vietnam and, with Washington’s staunch support, bypassed the elections. For a time he seemed to prosper, and U.S. officials—Senator John F. Kennedy among them—crowed about a “Diem miracle.” But the appearances deceived. In the late 1950s, an insurgency, supported by Hanoi (at first hesitantly), took root in the south.

By 1959, a new war for Vietnam had begun, a war the Vietnamese would come to call “the American war.” That July, two American servicemen, Major Dale Buis and Master Sergeant Chester Ovnand, were killed in an insurgent attack on a base near Bien Hoa, twenty miles north of Saigon. Theirs would be the first of more than 58,000 names carved into the black granite wall of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington.

FEW TOPICS IN CONTEMPORARY HISTORY
have been studied and analyzed and debated more than the Vietnam War. The long and bloody struggle, which killed in excess of three million Vietnamese and wreaked destruction on huge portions of Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia, has inspired a vast outpouring of books, articles, television documentaries, and Hollywood movies, as well as scholarly conferences and college courses. Nor is there any reason to believe the torrent of words will slow anytime soon, given the war’s immense human and material toll and given its deep—and persisting—resonance in American politics and culture. Yet remarkably, we still do not have a full-fledged international account of how the whole saga began, a book that takes us from the end of World War I, when the future of the European colonial empires still seemed secure, through World War II and then the Franco–Viet Minh War and its dramatic climax, to the fateful American decision to build up and defend South Vietnam.
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Embers of War
is an attempt at such a history. It is the story of one Western power’s demise in Indochina and the arrival of another, of a revolutionary army’s stunning victory in 1954 in the face of immense challenges, and of the failure of that victory to bring lasting peace to Vietnam.
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To put it a different way, it is the story of how Dale Buis and Chester Ovnand came to be stationed and meet their fates in a far-off land that many of their compatriots barely knew existed.

But it’s not merely as a prelude to America’s Vietnam debacle that the earlier period merits our attention. Straddling as it did the twentieth century’s midpoint, the French Indochina War sat at the intersection of the grand political forces that drove world affairs during the century.
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Thus Indochina’s experience between 1945 and 1954 is intimately bound up with the transformative effects of the Second World War and the outbreak and escalation of the Cold War, and in particular with the emergence of the United States as the predominant power in Asian and world affairs. And thus the struggle is also part of the story of European colonialism and its encounter with anticolonial nationalists—who drew their inspiration in part from European and American ideas and promises. In this way, the Franco–Viet Minh War was simultaneously an East-West and North-South conflict, pitting European imperialism in its autumn phase against the two main competitors that gained momentum by midcentury—Communist-inspired revolutionary nationalism and U.S.-backed liberal internationalism. If similar processes played out across much of the globe after 1945, Vietnam deserves special study because it was one of the first places where this destructive dynamic could be seen. It was also where the dynamic remained in place, decade after bloody decade.
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My goal in this book is to help a new generation of readers relive this extraordinary story: a twentieth-century epic featuring life-and-death decisions made under profound pressure, a vast mobilization of men and resources, and a remarkable cast of larger-than-life characters ranging from Ho Chi Minh to Charles de Gaulle to Dean Acheson to Zhou Enlai, from Bao Dai to Anthony Eden to Edward Lansdale to Ngo Dinh Diem, as well as half a dozen U.S. presidents. Throughout, the focus is on the political and diplomatic dimensions of the struggle, but I also devote considerable space to the military campaigns that, I maintain, were crucial to the outcome.
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Laos and Cambodia enter the narrative at various points, but I give pride of place to developments in Vietnam, far more populous and politically important than her Indochinese neighbors.

In retrospect, given the broader historical context, there is an air of inevitability about the flow of events in this story, as there is about a great river. A prostrate France, having been overrun by Nazi Germany in a mere six weeks in 1940 and further humiliated in meekly ceding Indochina to the advancing Japanese, sought after 1945 to reestablish colonial control, at a time when the whole edifice of the European imperial system was crumbling; how could she possibly hope to succeed? Add to this the ruthless discipline, tenacity, and fighting skill of the Viet Minh, and the comparative weakness of non-Communist Vietnamese nationalists—before and after 1954—and it becomes seemingly all but impossible to imagine a different result than the one that occurred.

Yet the story of the French Indochina War and its aftermath is a contingent one, full of alternative political choices, major and minor, considered and taken, reconsidered and altered, in Paris and Saigon, in Washington and Beijing, and in the Viet Minh’s headquarters in the jungles of Tonkin. It’s a reminder to us that to the decision makers of the past, the future was merely a set of possibilities. If the decolonization of Indochina was bound to occur, the process could have played out in a variety of ways, as the experience of European colonies in other parts of South and Southeast Asia shows.
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Moreover, difficult though it may be to remember now, in the early going the odds were against the Viet Minh. They were weak and vulnerable in military and diplomatic terms, a reality not lost on Ho Chi Minh, a political pragmatist who labored diligently and in vain both to head off war with France and to get official American backing for his cause. Nor could Ho get meaningful assistance from Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin, who was preoccupied with European concerns and in any event deemed the Vietnamese leader too independent-minded to be trusted. Even the French Communist Party, anxious to appear patriotic and moderate before the metropolitan electorate, repeatedly refused his pleas for support, and indeed connived in the venture of reconquest.

And so the Viet Minh for a long time fought alone, largely isolated in non-Asian world opinion. The French had a massive superiority in weapons and could take and hold any area they really wanted. Even after Chinese aid started to flow to the Viet Minh in early 1950, the outlook remained uncertain, as France could now claim a still-more-powerful patron of her own, in the form of the United States. Throughout the struggle, Vietnamese sources show, Viet Minh units under General Vo Nguyen Giap endured unfathomable hardships, including acute food shortages and logistical difficulties and, after 1950, the terrifying effects of a new U.S.-produced industrial weapon of the age: napalm. In May 1954, at the moment of the glorious Dien Bien Phu triumph, Giap’s army was exhausted, a spent force with sagging morale, in desperate need of a respite.

Politically too, Ho, for all his deep and broad popular support and charismatic appeal, always faced domestic challenges to his authority. Beginning in 1947, the French tried to rally to the anti–Viet Minh cause Vietnamese nationalists who so far had stayed neutral, and to peel away from Ho those anti-Communists who to that point had endorsed him. Ho himself saw the danger: What if Paris made far-reaching concessions to a rival Vietnamese regime, involving the transfer of genuine executive and legislative authority and a commitment to eventual independence? It could be a disaster. Later, after the partition in mid-1954, another worry: What if the South Vietnamese government—with a leader, Diem, whose nationalist credentials were almost as sterling as his own—could strengthen its authority to the point that it could doom forever his dream of a unified Vietnam under Viet Minh control? These were live possibilities, much discussed and debated in the Viet Minh inner councils and among informed analysts elsewhere.

Which is not to say they were ever close to being realized. To argue for contingency and the inherent plausibility of alternative outcomes is not to say all were equally probable. This is the advantage that hindsight affords. Though many senior French officials understood that in Vietnamese nationalism they faced a very potent entity, one made immeasurably stronger by the nature and outcome of the Pacific War, they could never bring themselves to grant the concessions necessary to have a hope of mollifying this force. An independent Vietnamese nation-state wholly or even mostly free of French control remained outside their imaginations; they could not make the mental leap required.
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Even Pierre Mendès France, a heroic figure to many for his longtime advocacy of negotiations with Ho and his key role as prime minister in ending the fighting in 1954, did not embrace decolonization, not fully, and not until after the game was up. American officials, who pressed Paris hard to grant full independence
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continue the war against the Viet Minh, did not comprehend the basic problem: Why should France fight a dangerous, bloody, inconclusive war that would end in the abandonment of French interests in Asia?

As for Diem’s prospects after 1954, these were never as hopeless as most early histories claimed or as rosy as some later authors asserted. An intelligent and courageous patriot, Diem was the only major non-Communist political figure to emerge in Vietnam from 1945 to 1975 even remotely able to think disinterestedly of his country’s future, of constructing a political framework, or of challenging the Communist leadership in the north on something approaching competitive grounds. Given the indifference among the great powers—including North Vietnam’s allies China and the Soviet Union—about following through with the elections for reunification called for at Geneva, it’s not impossible to imagine a scenario in which Diem’s South Vietnam survives, South Korea–style, into the indefinite future. But neither is it easy to imagine such an outcome. Over time, Diem’s shortcomings as a leader—his rigidity, his limited conception of leadership, his easy resort to political repression—became more and more obvious. U.S. officials, well aware of these weaknesses but seeing no viable alternative leader on the horizon, stayed with him, their leverage declining with each passing year despite the regime’s utter dependence on American aid. Contrary to common wisdom, it was Diem, not the United States, who possessed the dominant voice in South Vietnamese politics. Washington never had as much influence over Vietnamese affairs after 1954 as France had had before.

The Saigon regime faced difficult odds for another reason too. Many thousands of Vietnamese who might otherwise have wanted no part of Communism joined the Viet Minh against the French, motivated by a deep desire to achieve national independence. Among them were many of the most able and dedicated patriots in the country. Other nationalist groups, meanwhile, had either withered because they refused to choose sides or had thrown in their lot with the French against the Communists, hoping to achieve independence through incremental political reform, but instead losing all credibility with their compatriots for partnering with the hated colonial overlord. As a result, the human resources available to build a viable state in southern Vietnam after 1954 constituted, in author Neil Sheehan’s words, “a mere residue,” diminished by years of vacillation, compromise, and collaboration, riven by dissension and intrigue.
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